


what's the story, morning glory?

by catchafallingstarfish (spaceboy_niko)



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF, ScrewAttack RPF
Genre: Emetophobia, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Unrequited Love, hmm hanahaki tag didnt come up, unsexy choking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 22:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14066565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceboy_niko/pseuds/catchafallingstarfish
Summary: Hanahaki. Vomiting flowers – honestly, how poetically disgusting – caused by an unrequited love. If left alone long enough, roots formed in the lungs, latching onto the pleura and bronchioles and choking from the inside out. Could be fixed by surgery, but taking out the flowers meant forgetting everything you remembered about the person.They have too many memories for him to just let go.So that’s it, then. Chad’s dying.





	what's the story, morning glory?

**Author's Note:**

> YKNOW SOMETIMES YA JUST GOTTA WRITE AN ANGSTY HANAHAKI FIC BC EVERY TAG'S GOTTA HAVE ONE

Chad’s hacking cough doesn’t seem out of place – it’s cold and flu season, the bug’s going around, he’s not the only one. Surely it’s something that’ll pass.

At least, that’s what he thinks until he has to bolt out of the office, sprint round the corner into the bathroom and throw up.

He coughs again, the acid burn in his throat accompanied by a tickle, and a soft purple petal sticks on his tongue.

Chad peels it off with a look of wondrous horror and disgust, and throws it in the toilet bowl with everything else.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” he swears quietly at the ceiling.

He should’ve known it was bound to happen sooner or later. He should panic – he should freak out, he should cry and text Sam and ask him to come rub his back in the bathroom as he tries desperately to get them out of his system – because where there’s one, there’s definitely more.

But instead, he does nothing – he flushes the toilet, rinses his mouth out five times and goes back into the office like nothing had happened.

Sam raises an eyebrow at him. “You good, man?”

Chad shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. Probably picked up something, you know how it is,” he fibs, and fights down the urge to cough again. “Might not come in tomorrow.”

* * *

Chad doesn’t know much about it – only the name, and the cause, and the prognosis.

So he does a bit of research on his first day off – pulls up medical studies on it, closes quickly out of some particularly unattractive cross-sections and takes some notes.

Hanahaki. Vomiting flowers – honestly, how poetically disgusting – caused by an unrequited love. If left alone long enough, roots formed in the lungs, latching onto the pleura and bronchioles and choking from the inside out. Could be fixed by surgery, but taking out the flowers meant forgetting everything you remembered about the person.

They have too many memories for him to just let go.

So that’s it, then. Chad’s dying.

Chad James is dying, and it’s entirely Sam’s fault.

He coughs up another flower, fully formed and blooming.

* * *

Chad starts taking more sick days on the mornings when he can’t keep down the blooms, couldn’t if he tried, and they fill his bin to overflowing. The whole office is starting to get worried when he comes in, always short of breath.

He manages to record enough lines to get them through a couple of months of content, chugging water like he’s been in the desert for a month, stopping every so often to cough into a tissue and throw the crumpled flowers away. Boomstick is sheer murder on his throat, in a way that the voice has never been before.

Ben is worrying next to him in the studio, but Chad reassures him he’s fine. He’s just having an off day. His throat’ll be back to normal in a month, two at the worst.

He knows. He’s researched the mortality rates.

* * *

Chad coughs up a vine the next day. It sticks in his throat, and he nearly gags around his hand as he tries to coax it out further to get a decent grip on it.

It hurts like fuck-all when he pulls on it. It’s an awful feeling as it slowly and painfully comes loose from the lining of his lungs root by agonising root and snags on delicate things that aren’t meant to be snagged on, until he gags again and the end finally comes out of his mouth.

The tangle of blood, mucus and purple flowers in the sink gazes accusingly up at him through his tears.

He dumps the whole mess in the bin and brushes his teeth, pointedly ignoring the streaks of red that come up in his toothpaste.

* * *

His secret is let out during a particularly bad bout of coughing in the office, when a bud lodges in his throat and Sam thumps him on the back. He coughs and heaves again, and spits it out on the desk, followed by a mouthful of full blooms.

Sam stares.

“Why are you coughing up morning glories, Chad?” he asks quietly.

“So that’s what they are.”

“Don’t play dumb. That’s fucked up, that’s not normal.”

“What’s not normal?” Ben asks amiably, and takes one look at Chad’s pale face and the flowers strewn over the desk before he’s all over Chad, and soon the rest of the office is too.

“At least give us a damn explanation!” Sam sounds genuinely hurt, and so is something inside Chad’s chest, so he gives them all the story.

Not the whole thing, obviously – that would be dumb – but he tells them that he’s got something called hanahaki disease, it’s caused by a broken heart, that there’s flowers growing inside his lungs–

“Wait, literally growing inside your lungs? How does that work? How can you _breathe_?” Torrian asks incredulously.

Sam gives him a look so withering Chad can almost feel the flowers in his chest shrivel up. “You haven’t noticed he _can’t_?”

Chad goes on to tell a little white lie – that he hasn’t been able to find any cure, and so he doesn’t have much longer with them. He’d give himself a month.

A heavy silence falls over the group, and Chad racks his brains to find something else to say, but it feels like the vines have wrapped up into his head and are cutting off his train of thought.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts, and Sam steps forward, wrapping him in a warm hug and rubbing his back even as Chad coughs around a mouthful of purple flowers.

* * *

Chad’s breathing grows more rattly, like his lungs are falling apart from the inside out, and someone in tech gives him a bucket for under his desk. It’s humiliating, spending most of his working day spitting flowers and buds methodically into a bright orange plastic behemoth of a bucket.

He still saves his vine-pulling for the privacy of his bathroom at home, though. The roots are thicker now, no longer the hairlike threads that tickled his throat the first time – they’re becoming harder to yank out and he’s pretty certain the lining of his lungs is coming out in clumps – and the blood runs down his chin with his tears as he chokes them up.

Sam is always there, emptying his bucket for him, making sure he always has water on his desk and bringing him ice when his throat is raw from coughing and retching, sitting with him while he eats painstakingly slowly.

It just makes Chad worse.

“You don’t,” he rasps, and tries again. “You don’t have to do this, you know that, right?”

Sam shrugs. “I’d be a pretty shitty friend if I just left you to die, wouldn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Chad whispers, barely-there.

* * *

Chad would guess he has maybe three weeks left – his chest is on fire all the time now, and his voice is all but gone from his throat and larynx being scratched raw by vines – when Sam rushes into the office looking like he hasn’t slept.

“Chad, oh my god, Chad, you’re not going to believe this,” he manages through his excitement.

Chad raises an eyebrow.

“There’s a cure!”

Chad raises the other eyebrow.

Sam waves his phone in Chad’s face and Chad squints at the webpage about the surgery. It’s one he encountered in his own research, so nothing’s unfamiliar to him.

“I did some research, and they can remove the flowers! Your memories’ll go with the flowers, but if someone’s causing you this much grief, I reckon it’d be better if you forget them, right?” Sam smiles in so much earnest, and it breaks Chad’s heart again.

“It’s not cheap, I’ll give you that, but I’m sure we could fundraise or something for you. Extra Life this year, hmm?”

Chad shakes his head.

“No to raising money for you on Extra Life, or…?”

Chad shakes his head again, and Sam looks crestfallen and disbelieving.

“You’re not even gonna think about it?”

Chad doesn’t even realise he looks hurt until Sam reaches down and wraps him in a tight hug.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to– I just– I don’t wanna lose you, man.”

Chad shakes his head vigorously, and reaches up to hug Sam. “Me neither,” he mouths into Sam’s shoulder.

A cascade of petals falls into the bucket after he lets go. He’d rather these damn morning glories choke him to death than lose any memories of Sam.

* * *

Chad James dies on an ordinary Friday morning, with absolutely no pomp and circumstance.

Sam takes him home from work on the Thursday evening, lets him quietly retch in the passenger seat with a plastic bag, and puts him to bed almost straight away.

Chad tries to protest, but Sam shushes him and sits the wastepaper basket on his lap, ducking out of the room and leaving Chad alone.

Chad knows Sam means well, but it’s honestly getting harder to breathe the more time they spend together. The vines are constricting, now, and he can always feel them brushing the walls of his trachea. It’s like the constant need to cough, but he doesn’t want to have to rip the vines (and his lungs) out with Sam just in the next room.

Sam tries to get Chad to eat – he’s lost an awful lot of weight over these past couple of months, and his face is starting to look sunken – but he only manages a few mouthfuls, much to Sam’s frustration.

He stays with Chad for as long as he can, sitting up well into the night until Chad starts to nod off, then he sits out on the sofa, too wired up with worry to sleep. He can barely keep his eyes open when he goes in to check on Chad one more time before he falls asleep in the early hours of the morning.

The sight that greets him is painfully beautiful.

Chad seems asleep – placid, finally, no coughs to send his chest convulsing – and tangled snakes of morning glory vines are blossoming out of his mouth, strewn over his pillow like a fairytale princess’s hair. His chest – which Sam now knows to be full to bursting with plant life, big and blooming bright purple – is still under his jacket.

His hands are still warm, though, and so is his forehead under Sam’s mouth.

Sam Mitchell calls in sick to work.

**Author's Note:**

> oh in case you were interested, morning glories mean love in vain, which i didnt know until after i started writing with them.
> 
> if you want to see me make tj cry, you can visit me on tumblr @catchafallingstarfish. i'm very sorry tj.


End file.
